Decoding 'da Vinci'

Decoding 'Da Vinci'

Scholar: Don't read too much into it

By Carrie A. Moore

Deseret Morning News

From: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,590046313,00.html

If the throngs that packed a lecture at Brigham Young University
on Wednesday night are any indication, Utahns are as taken with
a best-selling novel about secret societies, cryptic messages and
the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ as the
rest of the country. And their interest may have as much to do
with knowledge — or lack of — regarding their own faith
traditions as it does with the twists and turns of the book's story
line.

"The Da Vinci Code," by Dan Brown, has stayed atop the New York Times'
best-seller list for months, selling more than 4.5 million copies since its release
last March. More than a simple murder mystery, the book has been touted by some
critics — and the masses who have devoured it — as a fascinating
blend of fact and fiction, packaged with enough conspiracy theories that some
readers who know tidbits about Christian history wonder if Brown has uncovered
long-hidden truths.

The book has become so popular that filmmaker Ron Howard is making a movie
of "The Da Vinci Code" for Sony Pictures Entertainment, expected
to be released in 2005.

In an attempt to help local readers ferret out Brown's intermingling of historical
figures and facts as the foundation for the book's fictional details and subplots,
the BYU Museum of Art is hosting a series of four lectures titled "The
Da Vinci Code: Mystery, Metaphor and Meaning, LDS Perspectives on The Da Vinci
Code."

The first, given Wednesday by Eric Huntsman, an assistant professor of ancient
scripture at BYU, drew such a large crowd that organizers had to close the
doors to the museum 10 minutes before the lecture began, leaving hundreds of
people outside. All 700-plus seats were filled.

Cheryl May, the lecture series organizer, said it had not been organized to
promote the book but rather to build interest in an art exhibit to open at
the museum in April. Museum officials have fielded numerous inquiries about
questions raised in the book, whose premise is that Leonardo da Vinci left
clues to the secrets surrounding the Holy Grail — which Brown identifies
as Mary Magdalene — in some of his most famous paintings, including the "Mona
Lisa" and "The Last Supper."

Several renowned scholars across
the country have spent months quelling some of the conspiracy theories outlined
in the book, and Huntsman's lecture addressed Mary Magdalene's relationship
to Jesus Christ. The notion that the two were married or had
an intimate relationship was debated for centuries and had been
debunked among the majority of Christian historians.

But ancient texts discovered and translated within the past century — including
the "Gnostic gospels" named after Christ's disciples including Thomas,
Philip and Mary — have rekindled debate not only about Mary's relationship
with Christ and her life after his death, but whether he told her information
before his Crucifixion that had been withheld from his apostles. Much of the
book's conjecture about Mary comes from such noncanonical texts, including
the "Gospel of Mary."

Current liberal scholarly discussion about such questions is presented in "The
Da Vinci Code" as factual information, shared during the quest by the
book's protagonists to find Magdalene's remains and the documents that accompany
them. Those documents — which Brown tells readers were retrieved from
the Holy of Holies in ruins of the ancient Jewish temple by a real secret society
known as the Knights Templar — purportedly show how the early Christian
church subverted the role of women.

He makes sweeping statements about an early Christian conspiracy to burn
5 million women as witches throughout Europe and another to cast Mary as
a prostitute. There is some truth in both characterizations, but scholars
dispute the details.

Huntsman, whose scholarly background is in classical Greek and Latin, is
writing a book about the Gospel of John. In the Greek text of John's gospel,
Huntsman said Jesus calls Mary "the apostle to the apostles," a reference
that also appears in Brown's book in a discussion about how the early apostles
were jealous of her unique relationship with Jesus.

Huntsman said he was contacted by several people before the lecture, concerned
about what he would or wouldn't say regarding questions the book raises with
relationship to LDS theology.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may be particularly
intrigued with the book for a variety of reasons, including their belief
that men and women can only be "exalted" with God in the afterlife if
they are married "for eternity" in the faith's temples. The church
has no formal doctrinal position on Mary Magdalene or her relationship to Jesus,
but the concept of a "mother in heaven" as a partner to God the Father
has been discussed intermittently by top church leaders.

Latter-day Saints are also unique among Christians in their acceptance of
scripture beyond the Bible, some of it translated by church founder Joseph
Smith from ancient papyri he obtained in the 19th century. They believe in
the Bible "as
far as it is translated correctly," and also that "many ancient scriptures
have been lost. Some contents of these sacred records are known, but much remains
obscure. Latter-day Saints look forward to a time when all things revealed
from God will be restored and made known again," according to the Encyclopedia
of Mormonism.

Other points of LDS interest include the role of women in the early church
vs. their role today. They believe Joseph Smith "restored" Christ's
original church to Earth, rather than simply "reforming" a corrupted
Christian church as early Protestant leaders had done. Women do not hold the
faith's priesthood, which is reserved only for worthy men.

Huntsman opened his lecture by reaffirming LDS belief in the New Testament
gospels, and prefaced the rest of his remarks with the admonition that readers
of "The Da Vinci Code" must keep in mind the difference between the
historical figures who actually lived and the literary figures, which Mary
Magdalene in particular has become in Brown's book.

He noted there is no solid historical basis for the assertion that Mary was
anything other than a close friend and disciple of Christ. While Latter-day
Saints and most Christians consider the New Testament a reliable historical
and spiritual document, the same can't be said for the Gnostic texts, Huntsman
said, which were written after the first century B.C. and are not generally
believed to have been authored by the disciples whose names they bear.

That's where much of the fact/fiction arises for readers.

In a foreword to the book, Brown claims that "all descriptions of documents
and secret rituals are accurate," and he lists reference works of renowned
religion scholars, including Elaine Pagels, a professor of religious studies
at Princeton. Pagels visited BYU and presented a forum lecture a few years
ago on the "Gnostic Gospels." She authored a book by the same name.

Pagels and another renowned religion scholar, Karen King of Harvard Divinity
School, have both written and lectured extensively on the extrabiblical texts
and their implications for wider understanding of the role that Mary and
other women may have played in the early Christian church. King released
a book last year titled "The Gospel of Mary of Magdala." The role of the "sacred
feminine" and its subjugation throughout Christian history has emerged
as a growing area of scholarship, in part through their efforts. Such theories
form a major plot within "The Da Vinci Code."

Interpretations of early documents on Christianity are always subject to
the "biases
and agendas and objectives" of those who are writing about them, Huntsman
said. Ultraconservative Bible scholars would consider them "heresy" or
ideas "the early church fathers just made up." Moderates examine
the traditions reflected in such works, including that which mirrors what is
found in the New Testament, noting that some "plain and precious things
have (had) a tendency to slip out" of sacred texts over time.

Liberal scholars often view them as "reliable facts suppressed by orthodox
Christians," and "The Da Vinci Code" adopts that position, he
said. "Just as we need to understand the provenance of scholarly texts,
we need to understand the spin of the author."

The lecture series at BYU is just one of the latest attempts to explain that
spin, and its larger historical and cultural implications, to readers.

Several Catholic and Evangelical theologians have challenged much of the
extrabiblical interpretation put forth in the book, with at least two of
them penning books of their own as a rebuttal.

Darrell Bock, a research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological
Seminary, was featured in an ABC-TV special last November exploring the debates
surrounding Mary Magdalene that have been fanned as a result of "The Da
Vinci Code."

"Dan Brown's book isn't an innocent novel," he said in a statement
from his publicist. "There is something else going on here." He believes
the book "at its very core is an attempt to reshape our culture and Christian
beliefs." Bock, who with other evangelical colleagues has posted a detailed
response to Brown's book on the seminary's Web site — www.dts.edu/dialogue — will
release his own book, "Breaking the Da Vinci Code," in April.

He said the book will "expose the failings of Dan Brown's research and
indicate where his claims are coming from. There is an important issue of cultural
and religious identity that the novel carelessly plays with — and he
is not alone in this effort." Bock's book is currently the subject of
a legal challenge.

Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary
in Wilmore, Ky., told the Deseret Morning News that Brown's best-selling
novel is "bad history, bad analysis of early Christianity, and it misrepresents
the Bible and the theology of God that's in the Bible. It's shoddy historiography
and bad art history as well."

Brown brought a cascade of criticism on himself, Witherington said, when
he claimed the rituals and documents he used to construct the book were true. "It's
closer to pure fiction than historical fiction."

Despite its popularity with readers, Witherington said even the Gnostic gospels
themselves don't claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. "The
Gnostics are aesthetic, they avoid sexuality. Brown is so poorly informed he
doesn't even understand he's jumbling gnosticism with paganism."

Witherington's new book, "The Bible Code," will be released this
summer, with the first three chapters dealing specifically with "The Da
Vinci Code." While he is aware of the scholarly work by Pagels and King
on the "sacred feminine" in relationship to Gnostic texts, Witherington
said he thinks such notions "are nonsense. . . . Jesus and the earliest
Christians were very progressive about the role of women for the context of
their time. Jesus Christ was the first early Jew I know of with women disciples.

"The big conspiracy theory idea that (early Christian leaders) were busy
suppressing goddess worship is not historically verifiable. It's true in the
Middle Ages there was a repression of women's roles, but I'm not talking about
that. During the time the New Testament documents were written, women were there
in abundance and doing a lot of things."

General public knowledge about Christian history is slim, he said, making Brown's
book seem scholarly when it's merely clever fiction sprinkled with fact.

"We live in a Jesus-haunted culture that's biblically illiterate. Anything
can look like it's possible."